Recipe of the week: harissa, tomato and lemon yoghurt rigatoni

Recipe from Green Kitchen: Quick + Slow by David Frenkiel and Luise Vindahl

(Image credit: David Frenkiel)

If you ever watch TikTok, say David Frenkiel and Luise Vindahl, you may have come across the dish that involves roasting a block of feta and some cherry tomatoes until they are soft, then stirring them into a sauce to serve with pasta. Our daughter loves it. This is a grown-up version: it is almost as simple, but has a lot more flavour.

Ingredients: serves 4

600g cherry tomatoes
3 garlic cloves, sliced
3 heaped tbsp rose harissa paste
4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra to serve
10g fresh oregano, leaves picked
300g rigatoni pasta
250g Greek yoghurt
juice of ½ a lemon
100g feta
1 bunch of basil, leaves picked and roughly chopped
40g pine nuts, toasted
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°C. In an oven dish, toss together the tomatoes, garlic, harissa, oil and oregano. Season well and roast for 25 minutes.
Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil and cook the pasta according to the packet instructions. Drain the pasta but reserve a mugful of the cooking water.
Remove the tomato dish from the oven, setting a few aside if you want to keep some intact, then add the pasta to the oven dish. Stir everything together, adding a little pasta water to loosen if necessary. You want the pasta to be coated in the flavourful tomato juice and harissa oil.
In a small bowl, stir together the yoghurt and lemon juice, then spread this across the base of four bowls. Top with the pasta, then crumble over the feta and scatter over the basil and pine nuts. Gently mix together so that the harissa ripples through the yoghurt, then top with any reserved tomatoes. Generously drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil and finish with a good grind of black pepper.

Taken from Green Kitchen: Quick + Slow by David Frenkiel and Luise Vindahl, published by Hardie Grant at £27. Photography by David Frenkiel. To buy from The Week Bookshop for £21.99 (incl. p&p), call 020-3176 3835 or visit theweekbookshop.co.uk.